Friday, June 5, 1998
Misunderstood remarks show tension on campus
CLARIFICATION: Clarification inadequate to illustrate root cause
of controversy
By Chris Cunningham
Dear Professor Michael Allen: I hope you will understand my
choice to respond to your e-mail and letter to The Bruin with an
open letter. I want to assure you that my personal experience with
you has been entirely positive, both in class and informally. But
your letter has raised concerns for me which I feel deserve a
broader airing.
Let me say first that I am not writing to contest your claim
about what you said and intended at the chancellor’s inauguration.
I believe that you would never sling such a crude and offensive
remark at an undergraduate student.
I am disappointed, however, that rather than recognizing the
reasons and context for the misunderstanding of your remarks, you
simply explain what you said and intended (an explanation which, I
must confess, does not fully clarify to me what happened).
Given the politically-charged atmosphere preceding and hanging
over the inauguration itself, I am disappointed that you do not
express a willingness to consider why your remarks have been taken
the way they have been.
To begin, the African American woman to whom the comment was
mistakenly to have been addressed – UCLA’s student body president –
had been removed from the auditorium after expressing, in her
scheduled words, her disappointment at the new chancellor’s
acceptance of the elimination of affirmative action at UCLA after
sitting for several minutes with her fist raised in silent
protest.
Most of the other few undergraduate attendees had already been
removed from the room for similar statements against the loss of
affirmative action. I urge you to consider that when undergraduates
– the least powerful members of the university’s academic community
– are excluded from the sites of power on campus, all they can rely
on for their understanding are the rumors, hearsay and secondhand
accounts of what is said in their absence.
I hope that you see how misunderstandings – particularly around
such racially and sexually loaded words as "the Queen of Sheba" –
are inevitable and should be attributed not to students, but to the
exclusionary practices which prevent students from hearing what is
really said.
More seriously, perhaps, I am disappointed that your letter goes
no further than to describe the failure of communication between
yourself and your listeners, both first and secondhand. The
abolition of affirmative action ensures the virtual elimination of
African American and American Indian students from UCLA and the
reduction of Latina/o students to shamefully low numbers.
In this moment of horrifying racism – and we cannot pretend it
is anything but horrifying racism – I am disappointed that you have
not chosen to write a letter which supports the beleaguered African
American, Latina/o, American Indian, allied Asian American and
white students on this campus.
As tenured faculty, you have carte blanche in your dealings with
students. Having seen the painful sacrifices that students such as
the undergraduate president are making – and they are painful and
they are sacrifices; having heard of students undergoing brutal
arrest for their non-violent protest – as the arresting officers
consumed the students’ food and drinks; knowing that UCLA is
becoming a university in which it will be common to not have
African American, American Indian or Latina/o students in any given
class you offer, you disappoint me when you avail yourself – a
tenured professor – of the loud voice of the student newspaper not
to speak out against the racism crushing this campus, not to
support the beleaguered students of color on this campus, but only
to explain that those students do not understand you.
As a lecturer who is moving on to a tenure track position at
another college, I worry deeply about how little UCLA faculty and
graduate students support undergraduate students, especially those
who both complete their own academic requirements and work to make
a better university for the students who have not yet even applied
to UCLA.
This letter, in this sense, is a parting request to you and
other faculty members. Professors, all-powerful as we truly are
vis-a-vis undergraduates, should work to make our first instincts –
not to protect ourselves, not to justify ourselves, not to point
out the failings of our students – to empathize with, listen to and
then truly be able to teach and foster the growth of our
students.